


Life in the Apiary

by wanderingaesthetic



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Cool Bee Daughter, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Sad Bee Dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 11:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3409232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingaesthetic/pseuds/wanderingaesthetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kiza isn’t in school long before she realizes that her daddy isn’t much like other daddies, and she isn’t much like other little girls. Scenes from the lives of Sad Bee Dad and Cool Bee Daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life in the Apiary

“Daddy,” Kiza says one morning at breakfast. “I don’t have any friends.”

“You have the bees. You have me,” her daddy answers, but he knows that isn’t what she means.

She is six years old and her hair is a fuzzy, white-blonde cloud that she tosses before she leans her head on chubby little hands and says “The little girls on tv have friends that are little girls. Or little boys. I’ve never met a little boy.”

Stinger’s stomach twists with guilt. He shouldn’t have ever brought home the television set. He shouldn’t have ever let anything from this world inside this house. He should have deprived her (and himself) of even the small luxury of primitive entertainment.

But it’s too late to take it back, and when your little girl tells you that she doesn’t have any friends, you help her find some.

**

Kiza isn’t in school long before she realizes that her daddy isn’t much like other daddies, and she isn’t much like other little girls. She gets angry at the other kids for coloring their pictures wrong until she figures out that she can see colors no one else can. When they learn about magnets and compasses and the poles in school, she raises her hand and says “Oh! Is it the same as how I always feel which way my house is?” and her teacher squints and frowns at her and doesn’t answer her question.

One day on the playground, another little girl named Tracey points at Kiza and shrieks. Kiza freezes while Tracey flails her arms and swats at her. Kiza windmills back at her in retaliation, thinking she’s being attacked.

The bee buzzes and lands on her cheek. Before Kiza can stop her, Tracey slaps at her face, and the bee stings Kiza.

Kiza cries all the way to the school nurse’s office.

The nurse pulls out the stinger with a pair of tweezers and gives her an ice pack for the swelling. Kiza still hasn’t stopped crying.

“Shhh, shhh,” says the nurse. “It can’t hurt that bad, can it?”

“They never stung me before,” Kiza says through crocodile tears.

“The bee stung you because it was scared of you,” the nurse says, kneeling to dab at her tears. “You’re so much bigger than a bee! Imagine if a bee was a hundred times the size of you! If you don’t bother them, they won’t sting you.”

Kiza nods. She’s still crying, but a little more quietly now.

“I’m not scared of getting stung,” she says, wiping at her face. “I’m scared of making the bees die. They die when they sting.”

**

“You made it sting me! Don’t you have bees in your house, stupid!?” Kiza yells at Tracey later.

Tracey stares at Kiza, mouth open in bewildered disgust, as if Kiza has just grown antennae. And wings.

“No?”

**

Kiza has never paid the bees much mind before now. They are an ever-present part of her life, and are thus beneath her notice. They hum her to sleep. She knows how to spot a worker or a drone or a queen. She knows about larvae and nurse bees and royal jelly. She knows that Daddy jars the honey and sells it and buys her food and dresses and toys with the money.

Now, she’s afraid to move in her own house. She can’t sleep because she’s afraid she might roll over on a bee. She creeps from her bedroom to the breakfast table to the couch, afraid of making any sudden movements.

Stinger notices, of course.

“I’m afraid a bee will sting me,” Kiza says when he asks what’s wrong. She is sitting stock still on the couch, tense and wide-eyed, hands clamped on her knees.

“Has a bee stung you before?” he asks while he stirs honey in his tea.

Kiza nods. “At school.”

“Were you bothering the bee?” Stinger asks.

Kiza shakes her head. “Another girl was.”

“Well,” Stinger says, and takes a drink of his tea. “I won’t bother the bees, and you won’t bother the bees, so they won’t sting you.”

“But they’re scared of me. I’m so much bigger than them! They don’t know I won’t hurt them!”

“Who told you that?”

“The school nurse.”

“Ah.” Stinger sets down his tea and sits next to Kiza on the couch. “Come here,” he says, and holds out his arms to her. She snuggles next to him.

“Bees know. They know that you’re bigger than them. They know to get out of your way. Bees also know if you’re scared. They know you wouldn’t be scared of them unless you thought they were going to sting you, and why would you think they were going to sting you unless you meant to hurt them? You have to trust the bees. Trust the bees and they will trust you.”

“Dad?” Kiza says into is ribs.

“Yeah?”

“Other people don’t keep bees in their house, do they?”

“Uh….” Stinger says, and turns his eyes to the nearest honeycomb, draped in a corner. “No. No they don’t.”

**

Stinger has finally come to enjoy this life. It’s slow, and calm, and it will be far shorter than the life he expected, but it’s beautiful in its way. As a Legionnaire, he never had anything of his own. Here he has a house, a business, a daughter. Even if he is poaching this life off of Abrasax land, the illusion of being in control of his own meager fortunes is real enough. He still misses his wings, but most of the time when he looks up at the sky he’s happy that he could fly once instead of angry that he can’t now.

Until Kiza gets sick.

“Chill out, Dad, it’s probably just a cold,” Kiza says when she notices how stricken he looks every time she coughs.

She has never had a cold before, neither of them have. The modifications made to his DNA by both his Splicer and the Legion prevent it. If there’s something wrong with Kiza, it’s probably something worse.

He never should have been so careless as to pass on his DNA. Even if he had a child with another Splice of the same brand, the risks were huge, and Kiza’s mother had been full-blooded human. He tells himself he’s lucky the defect he passed to Kiza waited until she hit puberty to rear its head.

But he doesn’t believe it.

If he could get to Aurous, or any other civilized planet, he could have her DNA repaired. It would be expensive, but it would take nothing more than an injection of an engineered retrovirus. She would be free of this defect, and any others he had given her.

But on any civilized planet, a disgraced Legionnaire Splice is worse than a leper. He can’t legally own property or earn an income. He can’t provide anything for Kiza. A short, beautiful life for her here is better than a short, ugly life anywhere else in the galaxy.

Or so he had thought. He had thought he could see her grow up, at least. He had thought he had more time.

**

Kiza knows that her Dad is keeping things from her. A lot of things. She realized this slowly, the way other children realize that their parents are lying to them when they tell them that Santa Claus brings presents to all the good boys and girls of the world, or when they tell them that their goldfish is going to go live in the ocean when they flush it down the toilet.

She has always asked him questions, and it’s not that he doesn’t answer, but his answers are so short and cryptic that she can’t make anything of them.

“Do I have a mother?”

“Yes.”

“Is my mom still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you from?”

“Very, very far away.”

“What did you do before you kept bees?”

“I was a soldier.”

“What are those scars on your back from?”

There had been a long pause before he answered that one.

“I had to have some…. growths… removed.”

The things that are weird about her dad don’t add up to anything she can name. He talks to bees like they are people, like they are _better_ than people. He sometimes stares at birds in the sky and stands in a sort of crouch, like he’s about to take off and join them. His eyes don’t look right in dim light. They reflect yellow and—she has to be imagining this part—have a honeycomb pattern like an insect’s. His accent is weird, like English or Scottish, but not quite.

Maybe he’s just crazy, she thinks. Maybe _I’m_ just crazy.

**

“Dad, I’ve been thinking. You look so worried when I cough or when I get so tired. I could go to a clinic, see a doctor.”

“I can’t take you to a doctor, Kiza.”

He won’t meet her eyes, and god, he looks so _miserable._

“Why not? Is it money? There are charity clinics.”

“You _can’t,_ Kiza, please.”

“What the _hell,_ Dad!? You look like you’re afraid I’m going to fall over dead every time I cough but you won’t let me see a doctor?”

“They wouldn’t be able to do anything for you,” he says very quietly.

“How do you _know_!?”

“I just… know.”

Kiza shakes her head at him, mouth open, bewildered, frustrated, pissed as hell.

“Kiza,” he finally says. “I… had a very different life before this one. I made mistakes, and I’ve passed some of those mistakes on to you. I can’t take you to a doctor, because if they see what’s wrong with you there are some…. People. Who might find us, and…. We might lose our home. They might kill us.”

His voice hitches like he might cry, and Kiza doesn’t know how to handle that at all. He is a grown man. He is her _dad_.

“What did you _do_!? Did you escape from prison? Were you in the Mafia? What the _hell_? Why won’t you tell me anything?”

“I can’t, Kiza. I’m sorry.”

She makes a wordless roar of frustration and rage, and runs out of his sight. They don’t talk to each other for over a week.

**

“ _Beeswax,_ ” Stinger says under his breath and sucks his bleeding thumb. The rose branch he was clipping falls to the dirt.

“Why don’t you just say ‘shit’ or ‘damn’ like a normal person?” Kiza asks as she pulls weeds behind him. She has spent enough time with her friends’ parents to realize the question would get her in trouble with most dads, but she knows her dad is not like most dads.

“When I was in the… army,” Stinger says, smiling to himself, both because the question brings back fond memories and because Kiza is talking to him again. “My friends and I each, well, _associated ourselves_ with an animal.”

“Let me guess. You were a bee.”

“Yes.”

They work in silence for a long moment.

“Go on,” Kiza says.

“One of our commanding officers was a horse and he would say ‘hoofrot’ instead of swearing. So the rest of us, making fun of him, swore saying something to do with our animal. One said ‘dogshit.’ One said ‘molt it.’ I said ‘beeswax.’ I stayed in the habit because if you want your child to grow up well-mannered, you don’t swear around them,” he smiled down at her.

“You and your weird bee obsession.”

“You don’t like bees?”

“Yes, I like bees,” Kiza says begrudgingly as she yanks dandelions from the earth. “But I swear you’re like, more like a bee than a person.”

“Kiza,” Stinger says and stops his clipping for a moment. “Do you remember when you were little, and you got stung by a bee?”

“’Cause of stupid Tracey, yeah.”

“And I told you that you have to trust bees for them to trust you.”

“Yeah.”

“I need you to trust me.”

“You’re not going to sting me if I don’t, are you?”

Stinger rests his pruning shears on his shoulder, and looks around at his little world: his house, his bees, his garden.

His daughter.

“Let’s go inside, there are some things I need to tell you.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Life in the Apiary [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3576150) by [Opalsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalsong/pseuds/Opalsong)




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